Monday, March 5, 2012

Breaking the Clutter Online Through Advertisements: A Perspective

The TV Screen, The Laptop/Desktop/Tablet screen, The Mobile Screen: the three prominent screens in our day-to-day lives. And marketers/advertisers have been, and are still, vying somehow to occupy space on all the three screens. While the TV screen was fairly well-captured long back, the confidence on other two screens is at best shaky.

How was the TV screen captured? You watching some drama, some action and snap... Bang. There's a new jingly wall in front. Yes, the one view was completely obliterated to show you another. All space gone in one go. Typical interruption strategy. After the ad's done, there's drama and action again. Action-Ad-Action-Ad. It's sequential.

So what's happening on the Laptop screen? There's some spot there, some spot here. The page remains for perusal, but some space is allotted to advertisements. Which means the content-for-perusal and the ad-for-interruption show up in close vicinity and at the same time. Advertising on Web Screen is largely space-sharing, unlike on television where it is largely sequential (one-after-another).

If researches on usability and eye-scanning-on-the-web are to go by, people develop blind spots when they become familiar with the web-page in question. It means certain spaces just don't register any more. Very similar phenomenon to your behavior in places that you are very familiar with. No matter how many obstructions or projections come in your way, after a while, your movement becomes smooth enough to dodge them.

This gives rise to an inference: if page-designs (especially layouts) remain the same/are standardized, ad-spots
will typically become blind spots. Bling spots are always reserved for
content, in whatever form. Whether marketers know this or not, that's the reason there is so much emphasis on engagement (or conversation). And engagement would only happen through content spots.

TV Screen erects ad-walls but Laptop/Web Screen cannot.

TV Screen uses dramatic breaks during dramas to drill into the consumer's heads, Web Screen allows great conversations to be soaked up by consumer's senses.

So what do ya got to talk about? Who's doing the talking? Does he know how to talk?